The soaring demand for network data throughout the globe has steadily fueled the evolution of networking technologies, as engineers and manufacturers rush to keep pace with the changing data consumption landscape and increasing network scalability requirements. Various network technologies have been developed precisely to meet this soaring demand for network data.
Typically, such large-scale operations involve massive amounts of traffic data constantly being routed through the various nodes and devices in the network. As the amount of traffic handled by the network grows, it becomes increasingly important to efficiently route such traffic: poor routing strategies can create an enormous burden on the network, which only worsens as the amount of traffic grows. Efficient routing can be accomplished, in part, by identifying routing information needed to route traffic, such as endpoint-to-switch bindings or mappings in a forwarding table. This way, nodes can quickly lookup precisely where traffic needs to be directed rather than broadcasting the traffic on the network or otherwise forwarding the traffic to unnecessary devices.
Routing information has grown in size and complexity as it has become more costly and time-consuming to use the larger and more complex routing information as systems and devices become more complex. As a result of the increasing complexity, current storage and lookup mechanisms for routing information have become slow, power consuming and costly.